Knowledge in TOK

Knowledge is the raw material of the TOK course. It is important that students and teachers
have a clear idea of what might be meant by the term knowledge, however, this is not such
a simple matter. Thinkers have wrestled with the problem of a simple definition of knowledge
since before the time of Plato, without substantial consensus. How can we expect students to
be able to tackle this question satisfactorily?
TOK is not intended to be a course in philosophy. While there might be a certain degree of
overlap in the terms that are used, the questions that are asked, or the tools that are applied to
answer these questions, the approach is really quite different. It is not a course of abstract
analysis of concepts. TOK is designed to apply a set of conceptual tools to concrete situations
encountered in the students Diploma Programme subjects and in the wider world outside
school. The course should therefore not be devoted to a technical philosophical investigation
into the nature of knowledge.
It is useful for students to have a rough working idea of knowledge at the outset of the course.
Towards the end of the course this picture will have become more rounded and refined. A
useful metaphor for examining knowledge in TOK is a map. A map is a representation, or
picture, of the world. It is necessarily simplifiedindeed its power derives from this fact.
Items not relevant to the particular purpose of the map are omitted. For example, one would
not expect to see every tree and bush faithfully represented on a street map designed to aid
navigation around a cityjust the basic street plan will do. A city street map, however, is
quite a different thing to a building plan of a house or the picture of a continent in an atlas. So
knowledge intended to explain one aspect of the world, say, its physical nature, might look
really quite different to knowledge that is designed to explain, for example, the way human
beings interact.
Knowledge can be viewed as the production of one or more human beings. It can be the work
of a single individual arrived at as a result of a number of factors including the ways of
knowing. Such individual knowledge is called personal knowledge in this guide. But
knowledge can also be the work of a group of people working together either in concert or,
more likely, separated by time or geography. Areas of knowledge such as the arts and ethics
are of this form. These are examples of shared knowledge. There are socially established
methods for producing knowledge of this sort, norms for what counts as a fact or a good
explanation, concepts and language appropriate to each area and standards of rationality.
These aspects of areas of knowledge can be organized into a knowledge framework.

Shared and personal knowledge

In many languages, the verb to know has two first person forms: I know and we know.
I know refers to the possession of knowledge by an individualpersonal knowledge. We
know refers to knowledge that belongs to a groupshared knowledge. It can be useful in
TOK to draw a distinction between these two forms of knowledge, as illustrated below.

Figure 2
Shared knowledge
Shared knowledge is highly structured, is systematic in its nature and the product of more
than one individual. Much of it is bound together into more or less distinct areas of
knowledge such as the familiar groups of subjects studied in the Diploma Programme. While
individuals contribute to it, shared knowledge does not depend only upon the contributions of
a particular individualthere are possibilities for others to check and amend individual
contributions and add to the body of knowledge that already exists.
Examples are easy to come by.

Physics is a subject discipline with knowledge that is shared. Many have access to it
and can contribute to it. Much of the work done is by teams of people building on
existing knowledge. While individuals can and do contribute to this body of
knowledge, the work of individuals is subject to group processes such as peer review
and replication of experimental results before it becomes part of the corpus.

The knowledge required to build a computer is also shared. It is unlikely that there is
an individual who has the knowledge of building such a device from scratch (rather
than simply assembling it from pre-constructed components). Yet we know how to
make computers. A computer is the result of a complex worldwide cooperative effort.

Shared knowledge changes and evolves over time because of the continued applications of
the methods of inquiryall those processes covered by the knowledge framework. Applying
the methodology belonging to an area of knowledge has the effect of changing what we
know. These changes might be slow and incrementalareas of knowledge possess a certain
stability over time. However, they could also be sudden and dramatic, revolutionary shifts in
knowledge or paradigm shifts, as an area of knowledge responds to new experimental results,
say, or advances in the underlying theory.
There might be areas of knowledge that are shared by all of us. The subjects studied in the
Diploma Programme might fall into this category. Of course it is not the case that every IB
student understands higher level biology or geography, but rather it is knowledge that is
available subject to certain conditions.
We are all members of other smaller groups too. We are members of ethnic groups, national
groups, age groups, gender groups, religious groups, interest groups, class groups, political
groups, and so on. There might be areas of knowledge that we share as members of these
groups which are not available to those outside, such as knowledge that is anchored in a
particular culture or in a particular religious tradition. This might raise questions regarding
the possibility of knowledge transgressing the boundaries of the group.
Here are some examples of such questions:

Is it really possible to have knowledge of a culture in which we have not been raised?

Are those outside a particular religious tradition really capable of understanding its
key ideas?

Does there exist a neutral position from which to make judgments about competing
claims from different groups with different traditions and different interests?

To what extent are our familiar areas of knowledge embedded in a particular tradition
or to what extent might they be bound to a particular culture?

Thinking about shared knowledge allows us to think about the nature of the group that does
the sharing. It allows international-mindedness into our exploration of knowledge questions.
Personal knowledge
Personal knowledge, on the other hand, depends crucially on the experiences of a particular
individual. It is gained through experience, practice and personal involvement and is
intimately bound up with the particular local circumstances of the individual such as
biography, interests, values, and so on. It contributes to, and is in turn influenced by, an
individuals personal perspective.
Personal knowledge is made up of:

skills and procedural knowledge that I have acquired through practice and habituation

what I have come to know through experience in my life beyond academia

what I have learned through my formal education (mainly shared knowledge that has
withstood the scrutiny of the methods of validation of the various areas of knowledge)

the results of my personal academic research (which may have become shared
knowledge because I published it or made it available in some other way to others).

Personal knowledge therefore includes what might be described as skills, practical abilities
and individual talents. This type of knowledge is sometimes called procedural knowledge,
and refers to knowledge of how to do something, for example, how to play the piano, how to
cook a souffl, how to ride a bicycle, how to paint a portrait, how to windsurf, how to play
volleyball and so on.
Compared to shared knowledge, personal knowledge is often more difficult to communicate
to others. Sometimes it has a stronger linguistic component and is communicable to others,
but often it cannot easily be shared. For example, an experienced tea taster who has
developed their palette through years of experience of tasting different teas will have a
complex knowledge of tea tastes. But the tea taster might find it difficult to describe the taste
of a particular tea in words in a way that can be understood by others. The taster might use
metaphor and simile to try to relate the experience of drinking this tea to others but the task is
a difficult one. In this way personal knowledge is frequently characterized by this difficulty in
sharing.
Personal knowledge also includes a map of our personal experiences of the world. It is
formed from a number of ways of knowing such as our memories of our own biography, the
sense perceptions through which we gain knowledge of the world, the emotions that
accompanied such sense perceptions, the values and significance we place on such thoughts
and feelings.
Like shared knowledge, personal knowledge is not static, but changes and evolves over time.
Personal knowledge changes in response to our experiences. What is known by an 18-yearold could be quite different to what he or she knew at only 6 years of age. The various ways
of knowing covered in the TOK course contribute to these changes.
Links between shared and personal knowledge
Clearly, there are links and interactions between shared knowledge and personal knowledge.
These are discussed in more depth in the knowledge framework.
Consider the example of a scientist such as Albert Einstein who has contributed much to
modern physics. Clearly, he had some personal qualities that enabled him to see further than
some of his peers. He had personal knowledge, a way of looking at things perhaps, that he
was able to use to propel his exploration of the difficult questions that characterized the
physics of the early 20th century. But his insights had to go through a thorough process of
review before being accepted as part of the shared body of knowledge that is the discipline of
physics.
There were disciplinary-specific methods that placed demands on Einsteins thought. For
example, his ideas had to be logically consistent, had to conform to previous experimental
findings and had to go through a process of peer review. They also had to provide predictions
that could be independently tested and verified (for example, the predictions made about the

visibility of stars normally obscured by the sun in the solar eclipse of 1919). Only then could
Einsteins vision become an accepted part of physics. This illustrates how personal
knowledge leads to advances in shared knowledge.
The reverse process can and does occur. Shared knowledge can have a big effect on our
personal view of the world. Not only do the familiar areas of knowledge impinge on our
personal experiencessomeone studying economics might regard everyday shopping in a
different light as a result of studying economicsbut shared knowledge as membership of
our cultural, ethnic, gender and other groups might influence our world view. This is what we
call perspective. Membership of such groups provides a horizon against which the
significance of the events of our lives is measured. Acknowledgment of such perspectives is
an important goal of the TOK course.
From an individual perspective, shared knowledge often appears in the form of an authority
a source of knowledge whose justification is not immediately available to the individual.
An example here is the authority of medical science to the patient who is not trained in
medicine.
Balance between shared and personal knowledge
It is important that the TOK course reflects the balance between shared knowledge and
personal knowledge. Too much emphasis on the personal at the expense of the shared is
likely to result in a course that is oriented towards the subjective experiences of the students
and does not look at knowledge beyond the individual to how knowledge is constructed in the
wider world. There is a tendency for such a course to become a succession of personal
anecdotes strung together with little or no analysis.
Biasing the course in the opposite direction risks losing the important links between the areas
of knowledge and the individual knower. Shared knowledge has a significance and value for
the individual that gives it relevance and importance. There is a danger that such a TOK
course could become too arid and fact-oriented. Making the distinction central to the course
brings the balance of these two elements to the forefront.
The ideal balance might not be 50:50; it is likely that significantly less time will be spent on
personal knowledge and more on shared knowledge. It is also likely that the best strategy is
not to teach them entirely separately. It seems difficult to examine areas of knowledge
without considering the impact on individual knowers. Similarly, it seems difficult to
examine personal knowledge in a vacuum without acknowledging that as individuals we are
embedded in a web of social relationships.